The Absinthe Tablet!

Since there's a bit of hype about a new product in the US today, how about some ideas for what an ABSINTHE tablet would have/could do?

A bottle of absinthe with the ability to download and add water to your personal preference, check for other absinthe lovers nearby to meet up with, mix a cocktail for you etc. Maybe for around $ 99.99?

- The absinthe board : with many brands listed, remotely linked to several review sources, searchable on many criteria, links to online shops with compared price (if available)
- The paraphenalia board :
- Recent paraphenalia : list of all known glasses, spoons, brouilles, foutains, etc, with links to several shops with compared prices
- Antiques : the whole MCD transcribed for spoons (on that part we wouldn't have the copyrights though), a database of all known pieces, with social contribution, and when available, price trending on ebay, and links and alerts on auctions for watched items

Erf, I would probably be able to create that, besides...

Edited by Aggelos, 28 January 2010 - 01:04 AM.

Absinthe makes me a different man. Why shouldn't he also have his two glasses ?Unless Absomphe-related, if it's about old things, you can ask me

If we don't have any members who are familiar with the iPhone app SDK, and who would be willing to do one for us, then perhaps we should just hire folks to create a WS app? I know I'd use the hell out of a WS app.

Every hour is green hour. -Hedonmonkey

Sometimes bad just gets so bad that it breaks thru to the other side and becomes good. - Phoenix

If we don't have any members who are familiar with the iPhone app SDK, and who would be willing to do one for us, then perhaps we should just hire folks to create a WS app? I know I'd use the hell out of a WS app.

I code for iPhone SDK. I'm new to it, coming to Objective-C from ECMA languages... but it hasn't been hard to pick up so far.

My thought for an app was pretty much precisely that - a spinner of sorts that lets you grab a brand from a list, then you read reviews on that brand. Maybe a map view to find out where to buy what in your location.

My hurdle on this is that, were I to code it, I would want it to be agnostic to absinthe-site politics, and have it cater exclusively to neither WS nor FV, fall under the jurisdiction of neither site, and be something that could be happily adopted by my both friends here and my friends there. Ideas for creating this neutrality include co-branding and using reviews/info from both sources, or making the app a separate entity and using data from neither source (but collecting endorsements of both).

In order to accomplish this, it would need a web interface as well - somewhere to cull the reviews from and store user profile data. And I'm not a web back-end developer by any stretch of the imagination.

Edit: I fully realize that such agnosticism may be pollyanna-ish of me, but I have several friends in other places that I would hate to leave out in the cold.

Yep. You'd need a database of reviews for the app to pull from, SQL for instance, and that would mean you would have to get approval from both sites to reproduce the reviews, as well as distribute the reviews. You'd also have to have a mechanism in place to update your review databases with any changes to the reviews on either site. Basically live updating between theirs and yours. That would be if you wanted an internet enabled app though. In theory, you could load an app already loaded with all the reviews, but that would require an update to the app very frequently to add the reviews which were posted since the last app update.

Not to mention the two rating systems are different. I'm thinking it may be harder than necessary to have a utopian app, versus having a WS app. Nothing saying it couldn't be ported for use by FV, either.

I saw an iPhone app for Joomla administration. I wonder if there's already an app out there which interfaces with Joomla sites as a client rather than admin? That way you could use the existing database information and just poll it on demand.

Every hour is green hour. -Hedonmonkey

Sometimes bad just gets so bad that it breaks thru to the other side and becomes good. - Phoenix

My hurdle on this is that, were I to code it, I would want it to be agnostic to absinthe-site politics, and have it cater exclusively to neither WS nor FV, fall under the jurisdiction of neither site ...

You'd also have to have a mechanism in place to update your review databases with any changes to the reviews on either site. Basically live updating between theirs and yours. That would be if you wanted an internet enabled app though. In theory, you could load an app already loaded with all the reviews, but that would require an update to the app very frequently to add the reviews which were posted since the last app update.

You can query the database on user request. Say, perform a small query just to pull brand names into a list... then query again once a brand is selected.

First of all, the data source :
you have to have contributors, whose contribution is easy to fetch, so database backend it is, on a collaborative solution.

Therefore, relying on the Joomla ratings tables fed by the WW review applet is, IMHO the only way to go.
The other way would be to copy the reviews in your own base, but you're facing evolution (no "dynamic" content) and rights issues, as you so clearly explain.

To be technology agnostic, besides, to cover not only iPhone, but also Android, and maybe the last versions of blackberries, would be to go "web app", once again, IMHO.

I propose, (and that's what I'll do) using a mobile templating framework (such as iWebKit), and implement the features, PHP based, hosted on the WW server, and exploiting the WW review application's database.

As far as being "site agnostic" is concerned, in the end, any joomla-based absinthe-oriented web site could have its own version of the app.

To be technology agnostic, besides, to cover not only iPhone, but also Android, and maybe the last versions of blackberries, would be to go "web app", once again, IMHO.

I propose, (and that's what I'll do) using a mobile templating framework (such as iWebKit), and implement the features, PHP based, hosted on the WW server, and exploiting the WW review application's database.

I think this is the best solution for coding a one-size-fits-all app, which people other than iPhone users could appreciate. And some of you will probably remember that the original third party iPhone apps were required to be webapps because of the concern that software apps on the phone could harm the integrity of the OS. So it's not a foreign idea to have web apps on the iPhone, and I wouldn't be opposed to them. I think coding an iPhone specific app using the SDK would obviously offer many more capabilitites, but it sounds like those capabilities aren't really things we would need for simple database querying and displaying.

I like both your ideas, but I'm more inclined to think that Aggelos' would reach more users, which can only be a plus in my book. And I'm and iPhone user!

Now, if the app were to evolve into more than an absinthe brand review database, and perhaps added some integration with the forum, messenger, etc, then I think the iPhone app SDK is the way to go.

Every hour is green hour. -Hedonmonkey

Sometimes bad just gets so bad that it breaks thru to the other side and becomes good. - Phoenix